A woman was killed and another person was injured after being struck by a car during a protest in Minneapolis’ Uptown neighborhood where a Black man was fatally shot earlier this month during an arrest attempt, police said Monday.

New York City mayoral candidate Maya Wiley would not say whether she thinks the U.S. is comparable to the Taliban Thursday, video shows.

Wiley was questioned about Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar’s comments comparing the U.S. and Israel to the Taliban and Hamas, video shows. She refused to answer and added that she was proud of her multiple congressional endorsements.

“I am not going to answer this question because I have been, actually, just come out of the debate, I appreciate you asking,” Wiley said in the video.

Caught up with mayoral candidate @mayawiley after the democratic mayoral debate asking her reaction to comments from @IlhanMN comparing America and Israel to the taliban, Hamas. Wiley says she’s been focused on the mayoral race pic.twitter.com/1kXS75wgce

— Elad Eliahu (@elaadeliahu) June 11, 2021

Wiley was endorsed by Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and four other New York Congressional representatives, according to her website. Ocasio-Cortez said she was “pretty sick & tired of the constant vilification, intentional mischaracterization, and public targeting of [Omar] coming from our caucus,” in a Tweet Thursday.

Omar received bipartisan criticism after posting a video where she questioned Secretary of State Antony Blinken about U.S. opposition to the International Criminal Court’s investigation into alleged war crimes committed in Israel and Afghanistan, NBC News reported.

“We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity,” Omar tweeted Monday. “We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.”

We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity.

We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.

I asked @SecBlinken where people are supposed to go for justice. pic.twitter.com/tUtxW5cIow

— Rep. Ilhan Omar (@Ilhan) June 7, 2021

Wiley did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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Kaylee Greenlee is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.

The post New York Mayoral Candidate Refuses to Answer Whether She Thinks the U.S. Is Comparable to the Taliban appeared first on The Georgia Star News.

The Chinese communist regime is trying to subvert the global human rights system to avoid accountability for its sweeping repression of rights within its own borders, according to rights activist Laura Harth.

Harth, the campaign director at Madrid-based nonprofit Safeguard Defenders, said the regime has been active at the Human Rights Council (HRC), the United Nations’ highest body for human rights, to remold the norms surrounding U.N. scrutiny of countries’ rights records.

“They’re proposing this definition: this idea of human rights with Chinese characteristics, with socialist characteristics,” Harth told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program. . .

Mayoral hopeful Maya Wiley has been endorsed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and other fellow Democrats who regularly decry the power of special interests and big money in politics — even though she has for decades been bankrolled by hedge-fund billionaire George Soros.

Soros, the 90-year-old liberal kingmaker often criticized by Republicans and others for his outsize political influence, has ties to Wiley dating back to the 1990s, and recently pumped $500,000 into an independent expenditure group backing Wiley’s City Hall campaign, on top of direct donations.

“If we don’t come together as a movement, we will get a New York City built by and for billionaires, and we need a city for and by working people,” said Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described democratic socialist representing parts of Queens and the Bronx, in endorsing Wiley earlier this month. “So we will vote for Maya #1.”

Wiley, a former MSNBC contributor and legal counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, tweeted the quote last week in soliciting campaign donations — to further stock a war chest already directly and indirectly aided by Soros. . .

Birmingham TV anchor and veteran newsman Christopher Sign was found dead Saturday morning of an apparent suicide, police said.

After receiving a call at 8:13 a.m., Hoover, Alabama police and fire personnel arrived to find the 45-year-old Sign dead, which Hoover police Lt. Keith Czeskleba said is being investigated as a suicide, AL.com reported.

Sign was a longtime reporter for several local ABC affiliates and had been the evening anchor on ABC 33/40 since 2017.

“Our deepest sympathy is shared with Chris’s loving family and close friends,” Sinclair Broadcast Group Vice President and General Manager Eric S. Land said. “We have lost a revered colleague whose indelible imprint will serve forever as a hallmark of decency, honesty and journalist integrity. We can only hope to carry on Chris’s legacy. May his memory be a blessing.”

In June 2016, while he was working as a reporter and morning anchor at ABC affiliate KNXV-TV in Phoenix, Sign broke the story of a secret tarmac meeting that occurred between former President Bill Clinton and then Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

[ The Daily Caller ]

Opponents of minimum wage laws tend to focus their criticism on one particular adverse consequence: by artificially raising the price of labor, they reduce employment, particularly for the most vulnerable in society.

“Minimum wage laws tragically generate unemployment, especially so among the poorest and least skilled or educated workers,” economist Murray Rothbard wrote in 1978. “Because a minimum wage, of course, does not guarantee any worker’s employment; it only prohibits, by force of law, anyone from being hired at the wage which would pay his employer to hire him.

Though some economists, such as Paul Krugman, reject Rothbard’s claim, a recent study found the overwhelming body of academic research supports the idea that minimum wage laws increase unemployment.

New research, however, shows this is not the only adverse outcome of wage floors.

‘When a Higher Minimum Wage Leads to Lower Compensation’

On Thursday the Harvard Business Review published an article under the headline, “Research: When a Higher Minimum Wage Leads to Lower Compensation.”

The article explores research conducted by Qiuping Yu (Georgia Tech), Shawn Mankad (Cornell University), and Masha Shunko (University of Washington), which leveraged a highly granular set of scheduling data to measure how changes in the minimum wage affected workers’ schedules.

“Specifically, we looked at worker schedule and wage data from 2015 to 2018 for more than 5,000 employees at 45 stores in California — where the minimum wage was $9 in 2015, and has increased every year since then — and at 17 stores in Texas, where the minimum wage was $7.25 for the duration of our study,” the researchers said.

The analysis found minimum wage increases had no statistically significant effect on total labor hours at a given store. However, the researchers did find changes in how those hours were allocated to workers.

“For every $1 increase in the minimum wage, we found that the total number of workers scheduled to work each week increased by 27.7%, while the average number of hours each worker worked per week decreased [sic] by 20.8%,” the researchers wrote. “For an average store in California, these changes translated into four extra workers per week and five fewer hours per worker per week — which meant that the total wage compensation of an average minimum wage worker in a California store actually fell by 13.6%.”

This didn’t just result in less overall income for many workers, the authors noted. It also impacted their ability to receive non-wage benefits.

“We found that for every $1 increase in minimum wage, the percentage of workers working more than 20 hours per week (making them eligible for retirement benefits) decreased by 23.0%,” the researchers said.

Strategically Reducing Other Forms of Compensation

These findings should come as no surprise. In a 2019 FEE article, economist John Phelan explained four ways employers typically respond to minimum wage hikes. One way was to cut the hours of workers, Phelan noted; another was to cut other forms of remuneration, including benefits like health insurance.

“Simply put, as the minimum wage rises, other elements of worker compensation fall,” Phelan wrote.

This is precisely what the new research highlighted by Harvard Business Review found.

“[Our research] suggests that as minimum wage increases, firms may strategically adjust their scheduling practices to reduce the number of workers eligible for benefits,” write Yu, Mankad, and Shunko. “Our estimates suggest that the average store in our California data set recouped approximately 27.5% of the increase in its wage costs through savings associated with reducing benefits.”

Again, this is not complicated stuff and should come as no surprise. If businesses are forced to increase compensation in one area, they’ll seek to reduce it in others to protect their bottom line.

The research also helps explain why some economists (a minority) are less certain that increases in the minimum wage will “substantially” reduce employment and provides an explanation for the few studies that don’t show unemployment increasing after minimum wage hikes. Evidence shows employers are finding more creative and productive ways to adjust to minimum wage hikes than simply laying off workers.

The Reality of Tradeoffs

Proponents of increasing the minimum wage have a tendency to believe it is a win-win policy. But economics teaches us that life is always about tradeoffs.

And once again, evidence shows minimum wage hikes come with adverse consequences, which tend to fall on the most vulnerable workers—those with the fewest skills and lowest productivity.

Proponents of minimum wage laws today are making the same mistakes that proponents were making in 1966, when Milton Friedman correctly predicted that a 28 percent national minimum wage increase would negatively impact employment, particularly for teens and minorities.

“Many well-meaning people favor legal minimum-wage rates in the mistaken belief that they help the poor,” Friedman wrote. “These people confuse wage rates with wage income.”

This was true when Friedman wrote it in 1966. And it’s just as true today.

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Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

Appeared at and reprinted from FEE.org

The post Commentary: Minimum Wage Hikes Led to Lower Worker Compensation, New Research Shows appeared first on The Georgia Star News.

Officials are worried that the US could face increased summer bloodshed — after mass shootings in three states left two people dead and 30 wounded Friday night into Saturday morning.

“It’s very disturbing what we’re seeing across the country and the level of gun violence that we’re seeing across the country,” Savannah’s police chief, Roy Minter, Jr. told reporters Saturday.

“It’s disturbing and it’s senseless.”

The top cop made the statement after one man was killed and seven other people were wounded, including two children, during a shooting at an apartment complex in the Georgia city.

Meanwhile, in Austin, Texas, cops arrested one suspect after a fight between two groups sparked a shooting spree on a crowded pedestrian plaza packed with revelers. Fourteen people were injured, and another suspect was still being sought.

[ New York Post ]