The Commentariat -- July 7, 2013

David Kirkpatrick & Mayy El Sheikh of the New York Times: "The abrupt end of Egypt's first Islamist government was the culmination of months of escalating tensions and ultimately futile American efforts to broker a solution that would keep Mr. Morsi in his elected office, at least in name, if not in power."

** Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times: "In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation's surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say.... The court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny.... The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come.... Unlike the Supreme Court, the FISA court hears from only one side in the case -- the government -- and its findings are almost never made public." ...

... CW: guess who chooses the judges who sit on the FISA court? Without anybody else having any say-so whatsofuckingever? Chief Justice John Roberts, that's who. And before him, of course, Chief Justice William Rehnquist. I'll bet those two fellows just loaded the FISA court with flaming civil libertarians. As Michael McGough writes in the Los Angeles Times, "Presidential nomination and Senate confirmation of judges for the FISA court would allow senators to question nominees about their view of the 4th Amendment and constitutional privacy rights." ...

I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal email. -- Ed Snowden, to the Guardian, June 2013

... CW: if Snowden really could wiretap & read the personal e-mail of "a federal judge," then it would have been a damned good idea if he had proved it by revealing some of the personal love notes or other embarrassing hoohah written by a few FISA court judges. What better way to cause them to rethink their cavalier rulings? ...

... Jeff Rosen of the National Constitution Center, in a Washington Post op-ed: "Repeatedly, our government has chosen technologies, policies and laws that reveal innocent information without making us demonstrably safer. The massive telephone and Internet surveillance programs disclosed last month are the most recent examples. But the tendency goes back at least as far as the USA Patriot Act, passed in the anxious weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, with only one dissenting vote in the Senate [Russ Feingold].... A better Patriot Act might have avoided national scandals over not only airport scanners and phone metadata but also wiretapping and library records. A better law could have dispensed with the 'trust us' mentality and mitigated the erosion of trust in government. It could have put us in a better position to detect terrorism and other serious crimes without threatening privacy." Rosen, a lawyer, goes on to suggest some improvements in the law. ...

David Mindich, in a New York Times op-ed -- citing President Lincoln & his Secretary of War Edwin Stanton's establishment of a draconian surveillance state -- argues that the problem isn't the surveillance as much as it is the duration of the amorphous war on terror....

... CW: Mindich has a point. Perhaps it's not coincidental that Snowden's leaks came precisely at the time President Obama announced it was time to wind down the war on terror. Would the Post & the Guardian have been willing to publish the same type of information in November 2001? Nonetheless, Mindich is not considering two important factors: (1) inertia, and (2) special interests, both of which encourage, at the very least, continuance of the surveillance state. The federal government has never been good at cutting back military-related programs (do you think Sen. Orrin Hatch [R-Utah] wants to shut down the NSA facility in Utah?), & private contractors' interest in maintaining & extending their multi-billion-dollar contracts (easily effected by greasing Congress) only exacerbates administration officials' desires to enhance their fiefdoms. ...

... Deadline. Daniel Arkin & Brinley Bruton of NBC News: "Venezuelan officials say they have not heard from Edward Snowden since the country offered the professed NSA leaker asylum, but would wait until Monday to hear if he would take up the offer." ...

... Add Bolivia to the list of countries that have offered asylum to Ed Snowden. So that's three: Nicaraqua, Venezuela & Bolivia. Hope the duty-free shop at the Sheremetyevo Airport sells Spanish-language Berlitz tapes. ...

... Catch 22? Nataliya Vasilyeva of the AP: "Because Snowden's U.S. passport has been revoked, the logistics of him departing are complicated. Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia have made asylum offers over the past two days, but the three countries haven't indicated they would help Snowden by issuing a travel document, which he would need to leave Russia."

Frank Bruni: "Protecting assets and massaging facts, Cardinal Dolan and other Catholic leaders have responded to the abuse crisis the way the cunning chieftains of a corporation might.... Over the last few decades we've watched an organization that claims a special moral authority in the world pursue many of the same legal and public-relations strategies -- shuttling around money, looking for loopholes, tarring accusers, massaging the truth -- that are employed by organizations devoted to nothing more than the bottom line."

The American Jihad. Historian James Byrd, in the Washington Post: "When colonists declared their independence on July 4, 1776, religious conviction inspired them. Because they believed that their cause had divine support, many patriots' ardor was both political and religious. They saw the conflict as a just, secular war, but they fought it with religious resolve, believing that God endorsed the cause.... Whatever century it is, our leaders often include some suggestion of the same biblical themes that filled revolutionary-era sermons, including sacrifice, courage for the fight and appeals for God's providential blessings on America."

Mackenzie Weinger of Politico profiles liberal talk-radio host Thom Hartmann.

Brian McFadden of the New York Times goes to journalism summer camp.

Congressional Race

It's All About Liz. Jonathan Martin of the New York Times: Liz Cheney "has made it clear that she wants to run for the Senate seat now held by Michael B. Enzi, a soft-spoken Republican [Wy.] and onetime fly-fishing partner of her father. But Ms. Cheney's move threatens to start a civil war within the state's Republican establishment, despite the reverence many hold for her family. Mr. Enzi, 69, says he is not ready to retire, and many Republicans say he has done nothing to deserve being turned out."

News Ledes

AP: "Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, is in critical but stable condition in a hospital in Nantucket, Mass." It's worth noting that a few days ago, wingers were berating John Kerry for "vacationing" during the Egyptian crisis. ...

     ... Boston Globe Update: "Teresa Heinz Kerry, leading philanthropist and wife of US Secretary of State John F. Kerry, was at Massachusetts General Hospital tonight after being rushed this afternoon to Nantucket Cottage Hospital, where a hospital spokesman had said she was in critical but stable condition."

Al Jazeera: "The continuing chaos in Egypt in the aftermath of last Wednesday's military coup has been compounded further after the choice of liberal politician Mohamed ElBaradei as interim prime minister was thrown into doubt by objections from conservative groups." Al Jazeera's profile of ElBaradei is here. ...

     ... Update: "A polarised Egypt entered a second week of political crisis, as opponents and supporters of deposed president Mohamed Morsi held rival demonstrations in Cairo and cities across the country. The rallies on Sunday came as a coalition that backed Morsi's removal wavered over the choice of Mohamed ElBaradei as interim prime minister."

Al Jazeera: "Turkish riot police have fired tear gas and water cannons to disperse about 3,000 demonstrators who tried to enter a park adjacent to Istanbul's Taksim Square, the heart of recent protests against the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan."

AP: "Fires continued burning more than 24 hours after a runaway train carrying crude oil derailed in eastern Quebec, igniting explosions and fires that destroyed a town's center and killed at least one person. Police said they expected the death toll to increase."

NBC News: "Investigators recovered both black boxes from Asiana Airlines Flight 214 on Sunday, NTSB officials told NBC News, as the airline's president said that engine failure was likely not the cause of the crash that killed two and injured scores more on the runway at San Francisco International Airport." ...

     ... San Francisco Chronicle Update: "The doomed Asiana Airlines jetliner came perilously close to stalling before the pilot made a last-second attempt to abort landing and crashed into a seawall bordering a San Francisco International Airport runway, injuring dozens on board and killing two teenagers, transportation safety investigators said Sunday. Preliminary analysis of flight data and cockpit recordings shows that the plane's speed was 'below target,' said U.S. Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Deborah Hersman at a media briefing on Sunday afternoon." ...

     ... Washington Post Update: "On Monday, Asiana spokeswoman Lee Hyomin said that Lee Gang-guk, the pilot in control of the Boeing 777, had little experience flying that kind of plane. She told the Associated Press that it was the pilot's first time landing in San Francisco and that he had nearly 10,000 hours flying other planes but only 43 hours on the 777."

The Commentariat -- July 6, 2013

** Joe Stiglitz, in the Guardian: "... it now seems clear that the negotiations to create a free trade area between the US and Europe, and another between the US and much of the Pacific (except for China), are not about establishing a true free trade system. Instead, the goal is a managed trade regime – managed, that is, to serve the special interests that have long dominated trade policy in the west... We have a managed trade regime that puts corporate interests first, and a process of negotiations that is undemocratic and non-transparent. The likelihood that what emerges from the coming talks will serve ordinary Americans' interests is low. The outlook for ordinary citizens in other countries is even bleaker."

Catherine Rampell of the New York Times: "Yes, the sequester is affecting the job market." Rampell explains, in part, how. ...

... ** Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge: "In June, the household survey reported that part-time jobs soared by 360,000 to 28,059,000 - an all time record high. Full time jobs? Down 240,000.  And looking back at the entire year, so far in 2013, just 130K Full-Time Jobs have been added, offset by a whopping 557K Part-Time jobs. And there is your jobs "quality" leading to today's market euphoria (if only for now)." (Emphasis original.) CW: why am I reading these figures for the first time? -- and not in the MSM? P.S. I don't get Durden's headline; I don't see what this has to do with Obamacare, unless means "Obama doesn't care." ...

     ... Update. Credit Annie Lowrey of the New York Times for (a) covering the rise in part-time jobs, & (b) clearing up Durden's ObamaCare dig: "The June jobs report saw a surge in part-time workers, and the health care law that starts coming into full effect next year might be in part responsible.... The Affordable Care Act gives employers an incentive to hire part-time workers rather than full-time workers, as they might be compelled to offer health coverage to the latter, but not the former. That’s why a number of big employers have started offering more temporary or part-time positions." The delay of the employer mandate may slow the shift from full- to part-time. ...

     ... CW: if we had Medicare-for-All or even a public option, corporations at least would have to come up with some other excuse to screw their workers. ...

... CW: maybe Obama doesn't care. In a White House blogpost, Alan Krueger, chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, is pretty happy about the great jobs numbers. No mention of part-time v. full-time. I wrote to Alan about that. I'm sure I'll be hearing back any day now.

Steve Coll of the New Yorker: "America’s post-September 11th national-security state has become so well financed, so divided into secret compartments, so technically capable, so self-perpetuating, and so captured by profit-seeking contractors bidding on the next big idea about big-data mining that intelligence leaders seem to have lost their facility to think independently. Who is deciding what spying projects matter most and why?" ...

... Jonathan Watts of the Guardian: "Venezuela and Nicaragua have offered asylum to Edward Snowden, the US whistleblower who is believed to have spent the past two weeks at a Moscow airport evading US attempts to extradite him. The Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, and his Nicaraguan counterpart, Daneil Ortega, made the asylum offers on Friday, shortly after they and other Latin American leaders met to denounce the diversion of a plane carrying the Bolivian president, Evo Morales, due to suspicions that Snowden might have been on board." ...

... David Herszenhorn of the New York Times: "... Edward J. Snowden has applied for political asylum in six additional countries, according to his associates at WikiLeaks, the antisecrecy organization. But the names of those six countries are being kept, um, secret, the group said on Friday." CW: yes, a New York Times reporter wrote "um" in a straight news report.

A Coup by Any Other Name. Peter Baker of the New York Times: When is a coup not a coup? Hmm, apparently when the U.S. State Department would rather not say. ...

... Peter Hart of FAIR: OR, maybe when the New York Times would rather not say. "... it's interesting to note the similarity between the U.S. government's public position on this question and the Newspaper of Record." ...

... Ed Kilgore has an excellent takedown of David Brooks' "reasoning" on the Egyptian coup. Carrying Brooks' theory to its logical conclusion, Brooks seems to favor a coup against the Tea Party. CW: well, okay, Brooksie! Where do I sign up? ...

... Marty Kaplan, in the Huffington Post, goes there: "Writing about Middle Eastern fanatics, Brooks says 'Islamists ... lack the mental equipment to govern.' Does he really not get that this diagnosis nicely fits the Tea Partiers, enabled by simpering colleagues fearful of right-wing primary challenges, who have ground our own government to a halt?" ...

... Another good argument by Max Read of Gawker. After illustrating why Brooks doesn't make sense -- at least if you care about democracy -- Read adds, "Shall we note here, the day after Independence Day, that it took the United States of America 13 years after rejecting monarchy to settle on a stable constitutional form of government?" ...

... David Sirota of Salon says what has to be said about Brooks: he has written, and the Times has published a column that makes an "argument that reads like a[n] unhinged manifesto from a 19th century eugenicist.... Once you get into deriding entire populations as intrinsically lacking the cognitive capacity for self-governance, you’ve jumped into the ugliest, most discredited and vile kind of invective of all — the kind of bigotry that insinuates whole populations are genetically, culturally or otherwise inherently deficient."

The Re-emergence of Dubya? Dianne Solis of the Dallas Morning News: "George W. Bush ... will deliver opening remarks at an citizenship ceremony and immigration forum at the Dallas presidential center bearing his name, where it’s expected he will talk about how immigration reform will be good for America.... It’s unclear whether the ex-president will stick to generalities during his remarks at the citizenship ceremony, or elevate the conversation with details about the super-sized immigration bill now being debated in Congress." ...

... Gail Collins: "Illegal immigration across the Mexican border is ... hardly the worst threat we’ve got out there. Last month, Rolling Stone had a long and terrifying article about how rising sea levels could begin to overwhelm Miami within the next couple of decades. Next time you see Senator Rubio [R-Fla.], be sure to ask him about this. If we can afford to pay border agents to catch three people a year [which is about the average per agent now], shouldn’t we at least be looking at getting the Miami nuclear reactors onto higher ground?" ...

... CW: in case you can't wait to find out what a discharge petition is (Collins teases it at the end of her column), Max Ehrenfreund of the Washington Post explains: "The discharge petition allows an absolute majority of the House of Representatives (218 lawmakers) to force a floor vote on a bill, even if the leadership, who usually controls what legislation makes it to the floor, is opposed. The opposition party can, in theory, use the technique to hijack the legislative agenda on an issue that divides the majority." Sounds like a plan, but it's only happened twice since 1986.

New York Times Editors: "The three Republicans on the [Federal Elections] Commission appear ready to take advantage of a temporary vacancy on the three-member Democratic side to push through 3-to-2 votes for a wholesale retreat from existing regulations.... The proposals are being pushed by Donald McGahn, the Republican vice chairman of the commission who has engineered repeated 3-to-3 standoff votes to stymie approval of staff recommendations for penalties against campaigners found in violation of the law. Mr. McGahn, a former ethics adviser to Tom Delay...." CW: Oh, let's just stop there.

Francis v. the Old Beanies Club. Hans-Jürgen Schlamp of Der Spiegel: "It appears Pope Francis truly wants to change the Catholic Church. He's reforming the Vatican Bank first, but he's also circumventing the old guard wherever he can. The establishment is up in arms."

The Commentariat -- July 5, 2013

The Well-Trained Hacker. Christopher Drew & Scott Shane of the New York Times: Edward "Snowden’s résumé ... provides a new picture of how his skills and responsibilities expanded while he worked as an intelligence contractor. Although federal officials offered only a vague description of him as a 'systems administrator,' the résumé suggests that he had transformed himself into the kind of cybersecurity expert the N.S.A. is desperate to recruit, making his decision to release the documents even more embarrassing to the agency.... Mr. Snowden's ability to comb through the networks as a lone wolf -- and walk out the door with the documents on thumb drives -- shows how the agency's internal security system has fallen short, former officials say." ...

... Timothy Heritage & Steve Gutterman of Reuters: Russian "Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Russia had received no request for political asylum from Snowden and he had to solve his problems himself after 11 days in the transit area of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport.... Moscow also has made clear that Snowden is an increasingly unwelcome guest because the longer he stays, the greater the risk of the diplomatic standoff causing lasting damage to relations with Washington." ...

... Surprise, Surprise. Steven Erlanger of the New York Times: "Days after President François Hollande sternly told the United States to stop spying on its allies, Le Monde newspaper disclosed on Thursday that France has its own program of massive data collection, which sweeps up nearly all the data transmissions, including telephone calls, e-mails and social media activity, that come in and out of France." ...

... Juan Karita of the AP: "South America's leftist leaders rallied to support Bolivian President Evo Morales after his plane was rerouted amid suspicions that NSA leaker Edward Snowden was on board and demanded an apology from France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. The presidents of Argentina, Ecuador, Suriname, Venezuela and Uruguay joined Morales in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba late Thursday to address the diplomatic row. Morales used the gathering to warn that he would close the U.S. Embassy in Bolivia if necessary." ...

... Kate Connolly, et al., of the Guardian: "Germany and the US will begin talks as soon as Monday, to address mounting European concerns over internet surveillance that are threatening to overshadow trade negotiations and damage Silicon Valley exports." ...

... Julian Pecquet of the Hill: "Revelations of U.S. spying on Chinese universities and businesses risk undermining cybersecurity talks with China scheduled for next week. The Obama administration had hoped to press China on the issue during the fifth round of the U.S.-China Strategic & Economic Dialogue. Instead, it finds itself on the defensive amid former contractor Edward Snowden's allegations...." ...

... Gene Robinson of the Washington Post: "I don't believe government officials when they say the National Security Agencys (NSA) surveillance programs do not invade our privacy.... It pains me to sound like some Rand Paul acolyte.... I just wish our government would start treating us like adults -- more important, like participants in a democracy -- and stop lying. We can handle the truth." ...

... Andrew Leonard of Salon: "Shrinking costs. Growing efficiency. That’s the 'frictionless' society, baby! Everybody gets empowered by the Internet. 'We' get easy access to all the world's information and all these neat new services and 'they' get easy access to us. Awkward! ... Maybe Edward Snowden's greatest contribution to society will end up being the way in which his leaks crystallized our previously vague sense that something was awry.... If we know the price, we can start to figure out if what we are gaining is worth what we have lost."

Joan Biskupic of Reuters: "At age 80, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, leader of the Supreme Court's liberal wing, says she is in excellent health, even lifting weights despite having cracked a pair of ribs again, and plans to stay several more years on the bench. In a Reuters interview late on Tuesday, she vowed to resist any pressure to retire that might come from liberals who want to ensure that Democratic President Barack Obama can pick her successor before the November 2016 presidential election. Ginsburg said she had fallen in the bathroom of her home in early May, sustaining the same injury she suffered last year near term's end."

CW: last week I complained about Tim Egan's laundry list of mostly petty complaints about President Obama. But this critique by Walter Bello, excerpted in Salon, is substantive & well-reasoned. The title of the piece is "Obama Should Have Listened to Paul Krugman"; however, Bello doesn't limit himself to Obama's policy mistakes, but goes into his fundamental political failures. Or, as I might put it, Americans -- including many Republicans -- voted for a liberal, & what we got instead was a cautious, mealy-mouthed conservative.

Tim Egan: young men are dying to save people's property -- homes they built in high-fire areas.

The Fake IRS Scandal, Ctd. Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times: "Two months of investigation by Congress and the I.R.S. has produced new documents that have clouded much of the controversy's narrative. In the more complicated picture now emerging, many organizations other than conservative groups were singled out: 'progressive' organizations, medical marijuana purveyors, organizations formed to carry out President Obama's health care law, and open source software developers who create software tools for computer code writers and distribute them free of charge." ...

... Jamelle Bouie in the Washington Post: "Today's story from the New York Times on IRS 'filtering' should be the final word on whether this was political targeting or a more mundane instance of mistakes and misjudgments from overworked bureaucrats.... Despite widespread evidence this wasn't politically motivated -- as well as signs it may have been justified -- Republicans have continued to hold the controversy up as an example of government overreach and 'Nixonian' behavior from the Obama White House (which, as of this writing, has not been implicated in the scandal).... We should expect Republicans to run hard on the IRS controversy in elections across the country, even as proof accumulates that this 'scandal' isn't very political at all."

Alex Pareene of Salon: "Basically the 'border surge' [provision of the Senate immigration bill] is a very expensive new expansion of a massive government program only it's the sort that conservatives like because it involves detaining people instead of giving them healthcare or something."

Annie Lowrey of the New York Times has a long piece on a "deficit owl" named Warren Mosler. Even though Mosler is really rich, "his prescriptions for economic policy make him sound like a warrior for the 99 percent. When the recession hit, Mr. Mosler said, the government should have spent and spent until unemployment came down to a comfortable level. Forget saving the banks through the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Washington should have eliminated the payroll tax, given every state $500 per resident and offered a basic job to anyone who wanted one." CW: weirdly, Lowrey does not address a matter she mentions in her second sentence: "Mr. Mosler lives [in the U.S. Virgin Islands] for tax reasons." Apparently Mosler's zeal for radically liberal tax policy does not extend to actually paying U.S. taxes himself. Virgin Island residents pay taxes to the V.I., not to the federal government, & there are lotsa loopholes -- no doubt those tax reasons for Mr. Mosler's V.I. residency.

CW: I wish I believed this. Paul Krugman: "... we are still, in a deep sense, the nation that declared independence and, more important, declared that all men have rights."

... Josh Levs of CNN: "Lady Liberty reopened her doors to the huddled masses Thursday, a sign of recovery from Superstorm Sandy's devastation. The Statue of Liberty's reopening was a big bright spot for an Independence Day dampened by soaking rains in much of the country and limited by the across-the-board federal budget cuts known as the sequester, which left numerous military bases without annual fireworks displays." ...

Independence Day???

A sign in a Lakewood, Ohio, public park. Via Business Insider.

Contributor MAG has sent along the revised, updated, federally-approved & finalized official Lakewood Parks July 4 sign:

News Ledes

The Orlando Sentinel summarizes the day's testimony & other events in the George Zimmerman trial.

New York Times: Egyptian "security officials said at least 30 people were killed and hundreds wounded in political violence nationwide, with half the deaths in Alexandria, Egypt's second-largest city. The Muslim Brotherhood, which organized the protests, said at least 17 of its supporters were killed. Witnesses said they saw at least five pro-Morsi demonstrators killed and many more wounded in gunfire outside the Republican Guard compound in Cairo where Mr. Morsi was believed to be detained...." ...

... New York Times: "The top human rights official at the United Nations, Navi Pillay, expressed concern on Friday at the reported detention of Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt and called on military authorities there to make clear the basis on which they are being held or release them." ...

... Washington Post: Muslim "Brotherhood-allied leaders [in Egypt] responded by calling for a 'day of resistance' on Friday, with nationwide protests planned after the traditional midday prayers. Although organizers called on supporters to remain peaceful, such rallies in the past have led to deadly clashes, and residents of Cairo and other areas braced for more chaos. Egypt's new president, a virtual unknown named Adly Mansour, vowed to include all sections of society, including Islamists, in an interim coalition government shortly after he was sworn in Thursday. But even as he spoke, an arrest warrant was issued for Mohammed Badie, the Muslim Brotherhood's 'supreme guide.'" ...

... Al Jazeera: "Thousands of supporters of Mohamed Morsi have gathered in Nasr City in the Egyptian capital to protest against his ouster as the country's president in a military coup. The crowds are expected to swell further after Friday afternoon prayers in response to the call by a coalition of Islamist groups led by the Muslim Brotherhood for demonstrations against the coup. The coalition on Thursday urged people to take part in a 'Friday of Rejection' protest following weekly prayers. The call is being seen as a test of whether Morsi still has a support base in the country, and how the army will deal with it." ...

... Al Jazeera has a rundown of international reactions to Morsi's outster.

AP: "Another solid month of hiring in June could signal the start of a stronger second half of the year for the U.S. economy. Economists predict that the government will report Friday that employers added 165,000 jobs last month, roughly in line with May's increase. The unemployment rate is expected to stay at a still-high 7.6 percent." ...

     ... New York Times Update: "The economy added 195,000 jobs in June, the Labor Department reported Friday morning, slightly more than analysts had been expecting and suggesting steady growth.... The unemployment rate, which is based on a separate survey from the one that tracks jobs, remained at 7.6 percent, unchanged from May." The writer, Nelson Schwartz, suggests how the report might influence Fed action.

AP: "Residents of a small mountain community northwest of Las Vegas were ordered to evacuate Thursday as firefighters continued to battle searing heat and rugged terrain while fighting a large blaze.The mandatory evacuation of Trout Canyon, a small community of about 21 homes, was issued late in the afternoon as a precaution...."

AP: "Pope Francis has cleared John Paul II for sainthood, approving a miracle attributed to his intercession. Francis also decided Friday to canonize another pope, John XXIII, even though there has been no second miracle attributed to his intercession. The Vatican said Francis approved a decision by cardinals and bishops."